FauxDonahoe

3 Theories on Why Fewer eBay Listings Are Showing Up on Google

It doesn't appear to be a deliberate eBay strategy as a check of their Robots.txt file isn't stopping Google crawling any listings. Your thinking that code changes may have caused some difficulty for Google is also improbable.

My best guess is Google's algorithm has changed again and, this time, caught eBay up in the process. Google is mad keen to keep commercial content buried in its index in order to force increased demand for Adwords advertising. Of course the less commercial, content rich sites that then get favoured in Googles' index are also likely to display the corresponding Adsense ads. Nice business eh?

But this could also be a deliberate policy because when you do a check of Google Products for anything now you will see every eBay listing there has a "rover" link (eBay affiliate link format).

eBay affiliates have been complaining this month that their performance is markedly poorer which again suggests eBay is doing less well in natural search.

Last point, the numerical Google Pagerank you mentioned (8/10) is now virtually a vanity thing only and has little influence on position in natural search which is based on a much more fluid ranking formula.

Earnings Preview: EBay

But as the stock price remains low the buy back is cheap. Could it be that we see a company that is going to be taken back in to private hands real soon? Then, with the effort being put in to jack up Paypal's numbers this year, we can recoup the cost of the buy back in one hit.

Cute eh? ;-)